大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by a volunteer from CSV Berkshire, Amy Williams, on behalf of Doug Bukin and has been added to the site with his permission.

During the London blitz I lived with my mother at my aunt Eva's house. My father phoned from Coventry; he worked for the Air Ministry. He was appalled at the sound of the bombing and the gunfire that he could hear because he wasn't getting any up there at all. So he said it's quite quiet up here come up to join me. We ended up in a pokey little red brick terraced house, which was a bit different from the modest but four bedroom detached house that we'd moved from. My father was working in the aircraft industry and we were sited almost in the centre of town. There were munitions factories, a Royal Ordnance factory, aircraft factories, chemical factories, all the way round us so we were completely surrounded. In fact it was called Hellfire Corner at the time.

I went to the John Gulson school. We did have some light bombing. The local Rex cinema was showing 'Gone with the Wind' and the following night received a direct hit and was demolished so it went with the wind. The seriousness of it didn't sink in as everyone was so amused that this was 'gone with the wind'. That was a new film then that had just come out.

My father was a senior ARP warden. All the other wardens used to come to our house to report their duties and usually have a cup of tea. ARP stands for Air Raid Precautions. The wardens were trained to look out for aircraft, to watch out for fires, to look out for people. Because of the comings and goings of these wardens in our house in the evening, and sometimes nearly all night if something was going on, we had to preserve the blackout. Every time the door was opened the light would shine out of the door. So my father rigged up a metal cylinder that came down over the light and worked on a string on pulleys from the door. Every time the door opened up the tin thing came over the light. That was the sort of precaution you had to be careful of and that was my father's job too to enforce the blackout. They would say "put that light out!" or they'd call out: "close that curtain" which is all very important in a blackout. There was no light whatsoever. The vehicles were going around with masks on their headlights that kept the lights lower than horizontal so no light shone up at all. If there was moonlight the bombers could see the outline of the city to a certain extent but probably not all that well from up there.

This particular evening, November 14th at about 7 o'clock, the ARP wardens all came in and they were discussing what a bright moonlit night it was. It was just the night for a raid. And very soon after, the air raid warning sounded.

Then a little time after that the bombers came, some later on, some early. We lived in Hellfire Corner and we were surrounded by war factories: Royal Ordnance, chemical, aircraft. When the attack started, the noise and flashes were unbearable. It was unbelievable, the noise and the closeness of it because Coventry wasn't a big city and it wasn't spread over that much. Anti-aircraft guns and searchlights were all around us and pretty close as well because they were protecting the war factories - and I hoped us as well. Myself and my mother were on sort of bunks under the stairs, that being generally the safest place in the house if you hadn't got a shelter and as we hadn't got a garden in this funny little house there was no place to put a shelter. The centre wall of the house by the stairs was usually the strongest place.

One time there was a loud crash and the house seemed to lift up. My mother noticed that our kitchen curtains were on fire and she went out to beat them out. And I can remember screaming to her "come back! come back!" and she did after dousing the effect of the incendiary bomb that had fallen. My father came back every now and again and told us what was going on. The house next to us was partly destroyed, there was a crater in the road about fifty yards away, the corner-shop was hit with all its goods - tins, packages - all over the road. Strangely enough, though not surprising in those days, nothing was stolen. It was all left there.

I think it was the longest night of my life. There was ten hours of almost continual bombardment and it was terrifying. This was one night when we didn't look outside it was too dangerous. I can still smell this large pickle jar of pickled onions that was under my nose at the time. And it's always put me off ever since. My head and nose were close to it in this bunker under the stairs.

The sound of the dive-bombers screaming was frightening. You also got to know the effect of a stick of bombs. A stick of bombs was when a bomber came over, opened its bomb doors and all the bombs dropped out one by one. So as they were approaching you, the bombs also approached one after the other, eight to ten bombs coming nearer and nearer going 'crumph...crumph...crumph' getting louder and louder, and you were just hoping that the last one hadn't got your name on it. But you could tell this sound of bombs getting nearer and all these bombs dropping. You worried a little bit about that I must admit.

The bombing gradually stopped at about six o'clock in the morning. There were hardly any sirens left to sound the all clear and there was no electricity at all. We emerged outside wide-eyed and tired to the smoke and the smell and the sight of destruction generally. The police and the ARP wardens were going from house to house to check on the living and the dead and securing possessions; there were many in the road which was full of pump hoses, craters, debris. Us and our neighbours were surveying the damage and we were beginning to secure windows and doors with mattresses, blankets and boards - mainly as a protection but also should the German bombers come back that night. We had no idea whether they would or not as it happened they didn't. I went over out of our little back yard and the Grand Union canal, which was right behind us, was normally about 15 feet deep in water and it was just a trickle of water. All the fire engines and the auxiliary fire pumps had just drained it fighting the fires all the way around us.

During the early afternoon there was a knock at the door and my uncle Harry from London was standing there. Apparently he'd heard about the bombing on the 大象传媒 and decided to drive up using his precious petrol. He got as far as the city centre but due to the extreme damage he had to make a detour around to us. The cathedral was destroyed, the large department store Owen Owen was gutted and was still burning, amongst many others. Apparently the nearer my uncle was able to get to us, the more his heart sank. He didn't expect us to have survived. He arranged then to take my mother and I back to London and we went back to aunty Eva's again. My father stayed because he had lots to do for the Air Ministry due to the damage.

My father later found a house on the outskirts, of Coventry; it was a nicer house as well. We moved into this house for a while. I was surprised to see a new phenomenon on the roads; about every fifty yards there was what appeared to be a large black oil drum with a chimney on it. I don't actually remember these being mentioned in any reports or war reports anywhere. They were smoke producers and someone went round all the streets and lit up the oil in the case of a raid, and it provided a smoke screen over the whole of the city so that the bombers couldn't see it. The smell of them was so terrible it was almost worse than being bombed! The horrible acrid smell was choking - it didn't do us any good. On this Coventry raid, the bombers were able to find Coventry ever so easily because it was such a clear moonlit night that they followed the all the railway lines from London which were shining in the moonlight, and they went straight to Coventry following the lines. This was the idea of putting the smoke producers in. There were other bomb raids in Coventry but nothing like that. The morning after the raid I went up into the loft and an incendiary bomb had fallen through into the bedroom. It had actually started to ignite and fizzled out. It didn't actually set fire to the house. They would come down, fifty or sixty at a time and as they hit the house the magnesium ignited.

I was then evacuated with about four other boys who'd been bombed out in the Coventry raid to a place called the Wyre Farm Camp School. It was near Cleobury Mortimer and adjoining the Wyre Forest in Shropshire. The camp consisted of about ten wooden dormitories, probably with about thirty or forty double bunks in them, with a hall and a refectory. It was originally built as and called an NCC site; we named it the 'Nazi Concentration Camp'! It was built for mainly itinerant agricultural workers before the war. For a while I was miserable and homesick. I would have been quite happy to go back to the bombs and so forth and go home but I settled in. My parents were able to visit one Sunday a month. We all had tuck boxes, and my mother always used to bring along my favourites: rock cakes. The rock cakes lived up to their name at the end of the month when they were rock hard. And a baking dish full of rice pudding - lovely! The parents were always invited to a roast beef dinner in the refectory, which was an enjoyable and rather rare luxury that they really appreciated. We spent our sweet ration at the school tuck shop. My friend and I were quite fed up with it and one day we tried to escape home on some 'borrowed' bicylces - 'stolen' would probably be a better word! We only managed to get as far as Kidderminster or Bewdley.
We were completely lost so we came back to the camp and nobody knew we'd escaped over the wire of Colditz, which was how we thought about our escape from the camp.

On a Sunday morning we'd have bacon and eggs. Everyone had a little notebook, all the kids had one, they wrote 'IOU one piece of bacon, IOU a glass of milk'. They'd always swap things that they did or didn't like. We bartered amongst ourselves. I loved milk, and in those day it was all full cream milk. At four o'clock in the afternoon, we'd all go into the refectory for a mug of milk. I loved it. I could have ten or twelve mugs of milk a day from the kids who didn't want their milk.

There was a little first aid place there as well. There was a nurse. Three or four of us caught mumps, and we ended up in an isolation dormitory.

The gates of the camp school opened out onto Wyre Forest which is a beautiful forest. It was lovely. One of the teachers took an interest in me. He was a butterfly collector and I expressed an interest in butterflies. He used to take me out, we'd get a net and a bottle of cyanide in those days, for killing the butterflies and putting them on a board. I probably know in wildlife more about butterflies than any other creature. I could recognise all of them from a picture and we collected about thirty-six or thirty-eight of the fifty-four species in that area. He gave me a tremendous background interest in nature. I thoroughly enjoyed that - it was lovely. You don't do it these days, you don't destroy wildlife, but we didn't know any better in those days.

It was a normal school. We'd have assemblies in the morning. There were communal showers which I hated. The big boys would always be slapping you with wet towels - big bullies! Then we'd have fairly frequent film shows in the hall, that was one of the entertainments. We were confined to camp. But on Saturday afternoons we were able to go into the local town Cleobury Mortimer, I always remember they had sugary sticky buns, and if you were lucky you'd get in and they'd have some. Spending my pocket money on them was wonderful I wish I could have one now! They were the best buns I've ever tasted. That was our afternoon escape. Sometimes on a Sunday we'd have a packed lunch and we'd all go out on a conducted climb of Clee Hill which was a steep hill: very close to and overlooking the Welsh borders. We'd climb to the top, and it was probably about seven or eight hundred feet high. I've been up since and it looks a lot smaller now than it did then! In the early autumn, September onwards, we would all have to go out into the field potato-picking. I hated that job. The tractor would go along and turn out all the potatoes in the furrows and we would have to go along picking them up. It was backbreaking work even for young people, putting them in buckets at the side of you. Then you got a penny or tuppence for a sack of these potatoes. I utterly hated that job, I really did.

I successfully set the entry exam to Coventry college, but we were called back to London again. I sat on the back of my father's large BSA motorcycle side-car. It had such a hard pillion seat and I can remember even now my bum was so sore when we were going to London sitting on the back of it! In fact my father bought a new seat for it to use in the future.

The great thing was getting a food parcel from America. You'd get a pen friend or you'd get a list of people; you'd write to someone in America or South Africa and suddenly you got this food parcel. I remember that we opened it up and said: "ahhhh!" It was like it was from heaven: there were tins of dried milk, a big sealed tin eight or nine inches in diameter full of sausage meat in fat which my mum made into sausage pie and things like that. There were also sweets in there, the odd packet of nylon stockings, that sort of thing. It didn't happen often but we did get them. They were very welcome.

Fruit didn't interest children that much, but you missed seeing it. You missed the bananas and the oranges. Sometimes some oranges would come over, but never bananas. The oranges would come up through the Mediterranean, but the bananas would have to come across from the Carribean and there were more important things to put on ships than bananas.

There weren't many toys available at that time. None that used war resources. You could still buy balsa wood model aircraft. I think it was available because we were in effect learning to identify aircraft and it kept kids' morale up. There was no such thing as plastic. I actually made some rather good models. We managed to get cellulose paint to finish them off, little tins of it. They were nearly as good as the Airfix kits that you can get nowadays. We made Spitfires, Hurricanes, Typhoons, Blenheims, Messerschmitt and other German planes.

The radio programs, the plays and Childrens' Hour, were marvellous. We used to sit around the radio and listen to the stories on Children's Hour, and plays as well. The Home Service was the only thing we listened to. Everyone sat around their radio in the evenings as that was when the news programs came on. Everyone was glued to their radios in those days. And you had a gramophone, you might have some records still left if you were lucky. We played cards and games, it was our own entertainment. Sometimes we used to listen to Lord Haw-Haw in the evenings: "Germany calling, Germany calling". We'd all be laughing our heads off at this man. We tuned into that not because
we were disloyal to the country but we just thought it was so amusing to hear this William Joyce, a British man. He was trying to reduce our morale. He would say: "your Winston Churchill is nothing but a capitalistic pig". We were just laughing at him. No-one took it seriously. Newspapers and the radio also corrected the propaganda that he said, although of course that was our own propaganda too.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.